Java drills deeper into European DTV
eetimes.com
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(09/03/99, 3:20 p.m. EDT)
BERLIN — Java made its digital-TV debut in Europe this past week, as key
consumer vendors came to the Internationale Funkausstellung show (IFA) to
demonstrate Java digital broadcast applications over Multimedia Home
Platform (MHP) set-tops. The demos, which sought to build momentum
around Europe's Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standard for Java-based
interactive TV, paired consumer giants Sony, Philips, Matsushita and Nokia
with such leading broadcasters as British Broadcasting Corp., France's
Canal+, Italy's RAI and Germany's Institute for Radio and Television (IRT).
MHP is a set of common application programming interfaces designed to
create an operating system-independent, level playing field for broadcasters
and consumer-electronics manufacturers. The goal is to provide all
DVB-based terminals — set-tops, TV and multimedia PCs — full access to
programs and services built on the DVB Java (DVB-J) platform.
Because the DVB specs are further along than similar efforts elsewhere, the
European movement could influence other DTV standards — including the
U.S. Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC)'s DTV standard,
U.S. CableLabs's OpenCable initiative, and its Japanese counterpart — by
making the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) a requisite element of DTV set-tops
and receivers. But a Java backlash, led by Microsoft, Intel and Thomson
Multimedia, is questioning whether the JVM requirement controverts DVB's
vision of open standards. "We are not anti-Java per se, but we do find Sun's
Java licensing policy unacceptable," said a DVB member, who requested
anonymity.
The key issue — which sparked heated discussion roughly two months ago
at a DVB steering board meeting in Geneva — is how to maintain
compatibility and security among different vendors' clean-room JVM
implementations. Sun Microsystems wants DVB and its members to plug a
Java byte-code verifier — Sun source code — into clean-room JVMs. Sun
maintains that the byte-code verifier is a must to ensure Java security. The
verifier cannot be written in anything but C code.
But an industry source who opposes Sun's request noted that "the
requirement to include Sun's source code in our own products is just very
upsetting to many of us." With Sun prohibiting Java subsets or supersets, the
source added, "We feel totally boxed in."
A high-level DVB source also noted that mandating implementation elements
from any one company, no matter how liberal the licensing terms, runs
counter to the concept of open standards. And some DVB members
questioned whether the byte-code verifier requirement would pass muster
under the stringent intellectual-property rights policies of the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). DVB eventually will come
under the ETSI umbrella.
After the June DVB Steering Board meeting, which led some DVB
members to insist that Java be purged from the DVB spec, the board gave
Sun a few months to come up with a proposal that might satisfy all DVB
members. The showdown will come on Sept. 23, when the steering board is
next scheduled to meet.
DVB chairman Theo Peek said Sun holds the key to resolving the remaining
MHP issues and added that he believes recent discussions between Sun and
DVB members have resulted in progress toward a resolution.
One industry source said that Mike Clary, vice president and general
manager of Sun's consumer and embedded business, met with Peek on July 1
to work toward a resolution. According to pro-Java sources within DVB, Sun
will propose at the board meeting that management of its byte-code verifier
be turned over to a third party and that the verifier be made available to
DVB members free.
Many DVB members also noted that they regard full access to all JVM
implementations as a given among those who have built consensus around
DVB-J, which comprises a collection of core and broadcast-centric APIs.
J. David Rivas, JavaTV architect at Sun Microsystems, said at IFA that Sun
understands "that DVB is an important standard, and its success is dependent
on Java. We are ready to do whatever it takes to ensure that [success]." He
added, however, that one remaining concern for Sun is "the compatibility and
security of JVM. We firmly believe they must be guaranteed."
Asked how the evolution of Java and of DVB might be coordinated in the
future, Rivas said, "DVB unequivocally owns [its spec's] evolution." It's
entirely up to the group to allow for new features, such as specific service
information, he said.
DVB is expected to finish the MHP API by the end of this year. If the group
fails to come to an agreement on Sun's Java licensing policy, Peek said, the
fallback plan is to decouple MHP and DVB-J from Sun Java and to write the
specs in a way that would circumvent the need to employ Sun intellectual
property. But the group hopes to avoid such a solution because it deviates
from DVB's vision of a unified, global application format.
ATSC has similarly been negotiating with Sun on licensing terms for Java
technologies. Aninda DasGupta, chairman of ATSC's DTV Application
Software Environment (DASE) group, said this past week that DASE is "in
the final stages" of those talks.
According to DasGupta, there's scant difference between DVB-J and
DASE-J. "They both make use of much of the JavaTV APIs defined by Sun
and its partners," he said.
In some cases, however, DVB-J has had to cater to the needs of current
service providers and their proprietary APIs, whereas DASE-J has not had
to worry about legacy systems, DasGupta said. "DVB members have also
chosen to use some very low-level APIs that provide access to 'system
information' [which is used for electronic program guides] and
data-broadcast protocols, whereas DASE has chosen to keep things at a
higher level of abstraction."
The DASE group has released the first draft of its specifications and is now
fielding documentation and user guides for APIs and presentation engines.
"Our next deadline is Oct. 30 for a final draft, and we expect to go to ATSC
ballot by the end of this year," DasGupta said.
At the IFA trade show, consumer-electronics vendors showed off
MHP-based DTV set-tops, expressing hopes for a common and open API
standard. Most had implemented a Java-centric software interface —
DVB-J — atop a proprietary OS.
Panasonic demonstrated an MHP set-top running its own real-time operating
system, PiE-OS. Sony showed a DTV set-top based on its Aperios.
Philips exhibited a low-cost solution for Java-based interactive digital TV.
The demo used the ST20 chip from STMicroelectronics, which had told
Philips that the part "would not be powerful enough to run Java," said Paul
Bristow, who heads product strategy for digital receivers at Philips Digital
Video Systems. "We proved them wrong."
Philips does, however, plan a switch to the MIPS architecture, and it will add
Philips Semiconductors' TriMedia chip to allow the set-top to decode such
media-rich streams such as MPEG-4.
Conspicuously absent from the raft of MHP demonstrators was Thomson
Multimedia. The French giant — in which Microsoft now holds a 7 percent
stake — has teamed with Microsoft to form a joint venture called TAK,
which will field an interactive TV platform and associated services for
broadcasters and TV-set makers. The platform will launch initially in France
and Germany.
The move could help Microsoft promote Windows CE in mainstream TV, but
it begs the question of how Thomson plans to migrate the platform to MHP. |
